


Send in the Clowns

by InkSplatterM



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Gen, Non-binary character, character introspection, non-binary Victor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 12:17:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8667355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSplatterM/pseuds/InkSplatterM
Summary: He’d been at the top of the podium. The saying was that it was lonely at the top. The saying was true. It was also a chore when you stayed there too long.





	

_Isn’t it bliss? Are we a pair? Me here at last on the ground, you in mid-air._

Victor didn’t use his phone often.

Oh, sure, he took pictures with it. Selfies in various places around Hasetsu that he then put on his Instagram account. He’d do an occasional Google search, or misuse Google Translate. But he never used his phone to be a phone.

No one called him. He called no one.

The only time Victor used a phone as a phone was when he stole Yuuri’s to talk to Celestino.

It was fine. There was little time for phone calls, anyway.

His parents had long passed away and he had no siblings. In fact, moving to Hasetsu was simple because he didn’t have anything to tie him permanently to Russia. There had been skating, yes. And competitions brought him outside of Russia. New ideas. New people. New venues. Hasetsu was the first time he didn’t go somewhere only to return to St. Petersburg shortly after.

 

_Isn’t it rich? Don’t you approve? One who keeps tearing around, one who can’t move._

He spent most of his childhood on ice. As a child, he first skated on a rink close to the apartment his family had lived in. Every day after school, he’d skip doing homework in favor of skating. It was the only place where he didn’t feel trapped. Even then, he knew that unless something amazing happened, he would never leave St. Petersburg.

Victor met his first coach when he was ten, on recommendation from his teacher. In three years, he was ready for the international juniors competitions. Three years was nothing when competing against other children, some of whom where nineteen years old and still in the juniors. They all had been skating for longer than Victor had. It hadn’t mattered in the end. His first coach hadn’t stayed long after that. She left because there was nothing more she could teach.

Victor’s second coach was another woman. She taught him that his image would never be his own again. Not unless he worked for it. That her lessons coincided with him mixing of masculine and feminine appearance wasn’t an accident. “The only way to survive is to make your audience keep up with you. If you have to keep up with your audience, just quit,” she said. Victor took those words to heart, and crafted his first surprise from it. He won or took second in all his events that year. The next year, when he was sixteen, he won everything.

He petitioned for a new coach when he went up to the seniors. She had wanted to keep him in the Juniors until he was seventeen. They made a deal, if he could clean sweep every event, he could move up to the seniors. She was a sore loser.

There was nothing to say about Victor’s third coach, really. A stepping stone, face and name and gender forgotten. The only importance Victor remembered of them was that they had introduced Victor to Yakov.

Victor was nineteen, reeling from the death of his parents, but never letting it affect his performance. He couldn’t. But he didn’t have his heart in it. Yakov had seen that, had galvanized him. The next day Victor showed up in Yavok’s home rink and said he was his student from then on.

Yakov, of course, was pleased at first. There was prestige of training a world class star, and Having Victor at the rink lead other skaters to petition to join. Then he found that Victor still liked to surprise people, and that “people” included his own coach.

Perhaps it did look like he had never listened to Yakov. But Victor had. He just would use it later.

 

_Just when I stopped opening doors, finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours._

Of the people Victor left behind in Russia, it was not surprising that Yakov was mad. No one could stay mad forever, though. And Victor thought he had pulled away from most of the other skaters enough so that he wouldn’t be missed.

It was fine.

He had been wrong. Yuri had chased him all the way to Japan. The action itself wasn’t surprising. How quickly Yuri came after him was.

Victor had spent a year trying to form a mentorship with Yuri. He had seen so much of himself in the kid, it was hard not to think coaching him would be a good option. Victor had been twenty-six. Thoughts of coaching were distant, “here’s a good retirement option”, thoughts with no concrete foundation. Then he had watched Yuri skate. There was the same drive, the same will to be the best. There was the same disregard for personal safety in the face of astonishing the crowd.

That was what drew him to the kid. Victor took the time to approach him, during practice, after competitions. All small, encouraging conversations to warm up into actual coaching. Every time, though; “Stop nagging, Victor.”

The challenge of coaching Yuri Plisetsky was teaching him that he couldn’t rest on his laurels. He won the Junior Grand Prix, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t be better than before, that there wasn’t more he could do. Victor would have been willing to meet that challenge, but there had been something missing.

Perhaps, he also had been too willing to “nag”. It would have been expected that he would have coached one of Yakov’s other students. Victor did not like to be so predictable. All the better then that he had seen Yuuri’s performance of the “Stay with Me” program.

 

_What a surprise! Who could foresee, I’d come to feel about you what you felt about me?_

 

Training every day with Yuuri was a new experience. Every day was a surprise. For so long, Victor had tried to surprise other people, but now he was being surprised. It was a nice feeling. Also so very odd. It was odd to have a constant companion, to notice when a certain person was gone. Victor liked it, this new feeling.

Was it because it was impossible to have a separate personal and professional relationship? What was professional was personal, and what was personal was professional. They interacted in ways that Victor could not predict. There was something new every day, a new facet exposed or refined. Sometimes it was a new facet of Yuuri. Other times it was a new facet of himself.

“I want you to stay who you are,” Yuuri said. Victor had offered him every role that he could think of, whatever would help Yuuri best, Victor would have become. It would have been professional between them, just professional, like so many of his other relationships in the skating world. But the role Yuuri wanted was “be yourself”. Who was Victor Nikiforov? How could he be Victor Nikiforov for Yuuri?

Be personal while being professional. Be professional by being personal. Victor had never done that before. He had to constantly keep up with Yuuri. It was a refreshing change of pace, chasing instead of being chased. It would not have been acceptable on the ice, having to chase the audience, but with Yuuri, Victor could run for years after him.

 

_Making my entrance, again, with my usual flair, sure of my lines… No one is there._

 

Victor lay in bed, one hand petting along Makkachin’s neck and back. The poodle leaned into his hand. For the longest time, Victor only had his dogs to come home to. He had followed the same schedule: train, go home, train, go home, train, Win another competition, go home. So on and so forth, the same thing day after day. Not even really talking to people. Or if he did talk to them, he had forgotten the conversation. It wouldn’t have been about much. The weather, perhaps? Or another forgotten promise? Or particulars of certain jumps or the prospects of other skaters?

It meant, though, that Victor didn't mind the language barrier between himself and Yuuri’s family. What would they talk about? Victor knew himself well enough to know he was a bad conversationalist anyways. At least, he was a bad conversationalist about anything that wasn’t skating. Skating was his world. He didn’t know much outside of it, and from what the triplets said, the Katsuki family didn’t know much about skating, despite supporting their son whole-heartedly.

It was fine.

Being isolated for one reason or another was nothing new.

He’d been without family. Training meant that he didn’t see them much, and after they died it was just him and his dogs. Makkachin and his predecessors were a lifeline for him. Dogs were loveable like that. It didn’t matter who he was with them. They had no concept of medals, just that he was gone for a time, then he would be back.

He’d been at the top of the podium. The saying was that it was lonely at the top. The saying was true. It was also a chore when you stayed there too long. People expected you to stay there, or they wanted to tear you down from it. Even the skaters that he had good relationships with still said their goal was to beat him. It wasn’t exactly a great way to foster friendships, even if he encouraged them to be the best they could be.

He’d trained hard. You didn’t stay the best by resting on what you already had done. That was the way of ennui. You always had to work to improve, work to do more. Yuuri understood that. Victor had found that it wasn’t inescapable even when you did train every day.

He’d found that he wasn’t exactly male. His programs where he mixed masculine and feminine imagery was as much an attempt to figure out himself as it was surprising the audience. His coaches had allowed it if only because he was good enough to pull it off. If he won, if it worked for both the audience and the judges, then there was little that a coach could say to kill the act. Perhaps they had thought it was just an experiment, a phase that would pass as quickly as it had come. It wasn’t, and even so… once he cut his hair again, he felt like a fraud. He could say that he was not a man, but was also not a woman, until the world ran out of oxygen, but everyone would only see what they wanted to see. To them, he was male. There was not much he could do about that. And given that he still preferred typically male pronouns… did he really have a leg to stand on himself? That was when he wished it had only been a style experiment. But it was worth it. It had to be.

It was fine. Absolutely fine.

He had to believe that.

The black costume from his Junior days was still one of his favorites. Yuuri looked amazing in it. He had made it his own. Victor couldn’t have looked away, even if Yuuri hadn’t insisted that he never takes his eyes away from him.

Watching Yuuri was more than fine, every single time.

 

_Quick! Send in the clowns! … Don’t bother, they’re here._


End file.
